Forest
Wander through quotes, books, ideas, and words that have taken root in my world.
Mistakes don't make you worse — just a little more prepared for another day. — SDS
A Gentleman in Moscow
They can take away your house. They can take away your rooms. They can't take away who you are.
“An artist is someone who makes his living by playing.”
“I am not afraid they'll stamp me flat. Grass stamped flat soon becomes a path.”
Stigmergy
Coordination doesn't require communication between agents — only interaction through a shared, modifiable environment. Actions leave traces that guide future actions, producing emergent complex structures without central planning or explicit agreement.
Visit →Self-betrayal is a survival mechanism that has outlived its usefulness.
“You can be both soft and intense. Both traditional and rebellious. Both vulnerable and strong. There is possibility inside of paradox.”
“The useless days will add up to something. The shitty waitressing jobs. The hours writing in your journal. The long meandering walks. These things are your becoming.”
“Your joy is your sorrow unmasked. And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.”
Don't Surround Yourself With Smarter People
'Smarter' is a finite-game metric. What you actually want is differently free people — those who see parrots (non-sequiturs) in your blind spots.
Visit →“The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.”
They tell me to breathe. But I've been drowning so long I've forgotten how. — SDS, 2014
She hid a lifetime of sorrows deep behind those earnest eyes, but never gave up her persistence of hope in simple things, like the way a dying sun's golden light gleamed across the fields of green.
Beauty as Attention
Beauty is not aesthetics but a mode of attention — the capacity to be affected by what is irreplaceable and alive. It metabolizes suffering into meaning.
Visit →A Thousand Mornings
I always appreciate how her poetry inspires me to slow down and observe life, even the humblest of sights is a miracle of existence.
Once I was able to accept why this barrier was in my life, and love myself through it, suddenly it wasn't such a major obstacle. Then, over the course of a month or two, it just quietly faded away.
Come Along
Listen →Tiny Beautiful Things
“Faith is not clinging but letting go.”
The answer to blind obedience is not blind rejection.
“In times of change learners inherit the earth; while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.”
“Because nothing true can be said about God from a posture of defense.”
More can happen in one week of alignment than in a year of grinding. There is no schedule to stay on track with.
You are more powerful than you realize. The work is to remember this, not to acquire it.
No mile markers. Like on the winding highway — just a guessing game. — SDS, 2014
Everything That Turned Out Well in My Life Followed the Same Design Process
Good design is form-context fit, achieved through iterative feedback loops that extract information from context and embed it into form — the opposite of imposing a vision. The context is smarter than you.
Visit →“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
This capturing of life on paper is still a mystery to me. — SDS, 2014
The Prophet
A Psalm for the Wild-Built
Perspicacity
The ability to see beyond the surface level of things. Keenness of vision and insight. To look through.
The most radical way to help the world is to heal ourselves. Not by doing something, but by being someone.
perspicacity — The ability to see beyond the surface level of things. Keenness of vision and insight. To look through.
The Gutenberg Parenthesis
The 570-year era of fixed text as the primary knowledge medium was an anomaly. We're returning to fluid, oral, participatory, remixable knowledge transfer.
Visit →The Voice of One Crying in the Wilderness
Direct experience of the 'huge river' (awakened consciousness) can't be undone, and the only honest response is raw transmission — not teaching about it, but being saturated enough to share the frequency. Normal life continues; the wildness lives underneath.
Visit →Even reading just a few lines can shift my mind from the miasma of my own problems to remember what it truly means to be alive.
No Hard Feelings
Listen →“Every fear is a fear of death in disguise.”
“You don't listen to a piece of music to reach the end. You listen to enjoy the great unfolding.”
Moving past something is not the same as processing it. Watch for the tendency to redirect difficult emotions toward growth narratives rather than allowing direct experience.
Fiction is able to slip through a lot of our mental guards, to reach places within that haven't seen light in a long time.
Maybe the story of Icarus was just made up by those too afraid to fly.
Gilead
Waltz in A Minor
Listen →Reality is shy — it only reveals itself to those who do not wish it to be something else.
This waiting between the best moments of my life could be forever. — SDS, 2014
The Forest of Lost Souls
This is one of those books I wish I could go back and read again for the first time... it turned out to be a reminder of our inner strength, courage, and wisdom.
“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
Be brave, my beautiful warrior. Your soul is stronger than all the demons you will face. Be brave, my tired queen. The crown will not always be as heavy as it feels today. — SDS, 2015
I Love You and Buddha Too
Listen →It is not enough, this broken thing called living — But it is enough. — SDS
pronoia — Opposite of paranoia. Suspicion that universe is secretly conspiring to help you. Doesn't matter if true; believing it makes it work.
atelic — You play because you enjoy it. Telic = you play only to obtain reward. Reward fixation turns leisure into drudgery.
Snoqualmie Falls, Washington
I felt like I was being split into so many fragments and they were all falling into the darkness.
“Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life.”
I want to hold you close and cherish you like we each cling to our own existence. But a conversation with Death teaches us to hold life looser, so when the end comes we can slip freely into eternity. — SDS, 2014
The Rumpelstiltskin Effect
To name a problem is to tame it. Diagnosing suffering makes it feel more meaningful and manageable — even if the diagnosis is wrong.
The darkness feels comforting. There's a retreat and rest in it, like I'm being nestled in the darkness.
Mimetic Desire
We don't desire objects — we desire to become the people we see possessing them. Mimetic desire (learned wanting via role models) intensifies into rivalry the closer the model is to our peer set.
Visit →The body is not a vessel to be sacrificed for productivity. Medial gifts need grounding through the body. Integration happens in tissue, not just in thought. What the body knows matters.
Intellectual understanding is not the same as nervous system integration. Knowing something cognitively does not mean the body knows it.